In professional football there have always been grey areas. For example, the offside rule has caused consternation down through the years and yet it is an absolutely brilliant concept. But offside is a bit like beauty, it is very much in the eye of the beholder.
How many times do linesmen - I still use the proper term - get abused by home supporters for offside decisions? It's a rhetorical question because neither you nor I can count that high.
During such moments the passion and desire of supporters sometimes - in truth almost always - ensure the facts of the offside decision are simply ignored as the heart overrules the head.
But it is in talking about supporters that the grey areas mentioned above take me to the point of this week's column.
Football supporters have been an integral aspect of professional football right from the very beginning. Indeed it was the enormous appeal of the game of football to the ordinary man in the street that encouraged some people running football clubs to consider making the game professional.
For instance, the Scottish football club Hibernian was set up by the local parish priest essentially to give the Irish community in Edinburgh a sense of identity and a location where they could congregate and share that identity.
The idea, and the club, attracted great support and success, and with the same parish priest quite correctly adhering to one of the finest traditions of parish priests right across the civilised world, the concept of charging admission money soon came into being (it always amazed me that not one of these old-fashioned parish priests ever became Minister for Finance).
However, much money was raised for local causes and the appeal of the club was such that it travelled to England to play exhibition matches, which obviously meant the players themselves had to be re-imbursed for their loss of earnings, and, between the jigs and the reels, professional football came into being.
Of course the English establishment re-wrote the story somewhat and professional football is erronously considered to be England's gift to the world.
But the point I am making, in my usual protacted manner I accept, is that right from the very beginning, football supporters have been an integral and essential aspect of the professional game.
This continued right through the first half of the 20th century. Vast crowds attended football matches across the world as the appeal of the beautiful game spread like wildfire to all parts of the globe.
Attendances very often passed way above the 100,000 mark in many countries, and one only has to look at old black-and-white photographs to see concrete terraces soaring to the clouds packed with people.
Even here in Ireland right up to the late 1960s, attendances were hugely impressive.
During my time at Shamrock Rovers I regularly played in front of over 20,000 spectators at Milltown, and my first Cup Final in 1968 against Waterford attracted over 40,000 supporters to Dalymount Park.
Flower Lodge in Cork also accomodated 20,000 mad Munstermen on a very consistent basis.
I was also fortunate enough to have played for Gillingham Football Club against Charlton Athletic at the 'Old' Valley ground in South East London in 1975, just before it was closed down.
It was staggering to walk out onto the pitch and look up at the seemingly endless rows of concrete terracing stretching high into the moonlit sky.
So high was the terrace opposite the main stand that the floodlights struggled to light the top echelon.
There were about 25,000 people at that game in a stadium that had regularly hosted 75,000-plus in days gone by, but the atmosphere was quite outstanding as the venue was a natural bowl, and I could only begin to imagine that, when filled to the brim, it must have looked like an absolutely massive reservoir of people.
But while supporters were the very lifeblood of professional football for decades - there being no commercial departments attached to clubs in those days - there was little or no investment made on their behalf.
The Valley itself had to be closed because nobody planned ahead.
Dalymount Park became but a pale shadow of its former self while both Milltown and Flower Lodge have been lost forever to the game of football.
The thing is, had supporters been afforded their rightful place in the overall scheme of things - which was, I believe, the whole idea originally for the parish priest in Edinburgh - proper action would have been instigated during those glory days and Ireland for example would have stadia that would have been as much a testimony to the importance of supporters as it would be to the performers themselves. But those were different days, and unfortunately different ways dictated.
I was in Turner's Cross on Thursday for Cork City's UEFA Cup game and there was about 4,500 fans and the full old-fashioned glory of the true football supporter was highlighted, at least in the second half.
It reminded me of my time in Cork when a jam-packed Turner's Cross was a sight to behold.
With the encouragement of 'The Shed' end, the fans consistently and vividly illustrated the rightful place football fans hold in the game of professional football.
The wonderfully vociferous and spontaneous eruption of passion from all areas of the stadium would literally compel the City players to launch non-stop assaults on the opposition goal.
When football fans across the world have a real belief in their team, there are no grey areas whatsoever.
True football supporters prove time and time again that whether there are 7,000 or 70,000 fans in attendence, the passion is just as important as the numbers.
This is what being a supporter is all about. It is all or nothing. It is everything.
